Digital Currency takes first step to becoming a legitimate UK currency.

The UK are now investing in a research body to examine digital currency. It is suggested that George Osbourne will invest £10 million for a formal research group and the Bank of England are involved

Up until now the world has been a bit slow to the party in regard to crypto-currency such as Bitcoin, LiteCoin and DogeCoin and so on. Bitcoin being the most famous and profitable has a pretty dodgy usage on the dark net, from criminal activities of organised crime and all that entails including paying ‘wages’ and paying blackmail demands, such as the case with this story I reported here.

It is also likley to be used to fund terrorism and the British Government want to examine this more closely with a view to taking this far more seriously, and legitimize it as a genuine currency. This can then be monitored for potential money laundering.

However, some suggest this is naive as the way crypto-currencies function can in itself become a money that never actually needs to be traded for ‘real money’. Rather it can be used in a similar way to a ‘tab’ or pool. It is often the investment opportunity and ‘farming’ of this that fudges the issue. After all we cannot print our own money, but we can generate it using algorithms on Video cards as I have shown here in my coin miner guide. And how do you prove that?

Reuters have reported:

Tom Robinson, co-founder of Elliptic, the world’s first bitcoin insurance vault in London, and a board member of the UK Digital Currency Association, said the new regulation effectively served as a “stamp of approval” from the government.

“It provides enough oversight to provide legitimacy without stifling innovation,” he said. “I think it is a good balance between on the one hand the U.S. and specifically New York, which I think have gone too far, and what a lot of countries are doing which is just completely ignoring it.”

The interesting thing here is that it may make other governments also legitimize it and other currencies. But there is still a long way to go.